In This Light (17 page)

Now it’s the blue room at night, and Estrelle stands in the corner, and Dora thinks she should have gone home hours ago, and why does she stand there, and Estrelle says,
Don’t you ever tell.

She thinks he comes again. She thinks he’s a scatter of stones, but it’s only rain. She thinks he must know what’s happened to her body, how she’s forever changed. But only Estrelle comes, only Estrelle speaks.
Boys like mine still rising out of the swamps because of ignorant girls like you.

He who’s touched her everywhere, who touches her now, who’s asked with his silent hands what happened here and here—green bruise, white scar—he who’s seen her body in every light, touched her body in every dark place, whose fingers brush her lips like moth wings, he never comes.

He’s lying in his bed and she can’t believe he doesn’t feel the hard table beneath them, doesn’t see the paper birds, doesn’t ride and ride and then lie down forever in the white box, doesn’t lie down to burn in the field with her.

It’s September. Dora Stone is still fourteen, starting ninth grade. She trims the dark ends of her hair, lets it grow back blond. She visits friends. She swims in tiny turquoise pools. She drinks rum and orange juice like the other girls. A glass shatters on concrete. She laughs at her own stupid hands, her own foot bleeding.

Dora’s sixteen, and Estrelle’s in the kitchen crying, saying her poor mama’s dead at last and Lewis going to be married next week, moving north with his pretty wife, baby coming a little bit soon but not too soon, and Lewis gonna get that training, be an EMT like he always wanted.
Did he?
Dora doesn’t know. Think of it, her boy, saving lives every night, and yes she’s worried and yes she’ll miss him but mostly she’s proud. Estrelle’s in the blue room in the middle of the night. She’s got her hand over Dora’s mouth. Grandfather’s had the seventh stroke. The wind blows the curtains over the bed; the woman’s gone.

There’s a man on the television. Mugged having a heart attack. Detroit.
Lewis, is this where you are?
Revived by an off-duty EMT.
Did you save him? Did you rip his shirt, put your hands on his chest, your mouth on his mouth?

Dora’s twenty. She lives alone, has left her mother forty miles north in the big house, alone. She has a job.

Collecting urine.

Taking blood.

Everybody in this city is terrified: the men with big veins, the women with no hair, the little girls pissing in jars. Nobody wants to find out. She knows what to do. She knows how scared they are, that later, when they know for sure, they’ll be hurt all the time. So she’s careful with the needle and the rubber hose. She doesn’t want to hurt them now.

She’s had lovers, a string of them, a parade—the serial lovers, she calls them, one after another. She’s dangerous still—this body, this skin, this blood—
don’t touch me if you don’t want to know.
But they do touch. They come and go. They pass through her and under her. They pin her down.

Sometimes she thinks he’ll come the way the others come. They’re muddied reflections in black water—they’re imprints in white sand—they’re mouths opening in the rain—her lovers—they’re a line of men in white masks and white gowns—they’re the wrinkled sheets—they’re naked boys. They want her to lie down.

He thinks he was the one in danger. You could argue with him now. You could show him your rubber gloves, the vials of blood, the spit in the sink, the warm yellow fluid trembling in glistening jars. You could tell him how careful you are at work, how careless at home. You could tell him how it felt on the hard table, on the long ride, in the refrigerator, in the dark room, how it was through the days of silence that followed and now through the years of fear when you think this will happen again and again—to your body alone— this will keep happening until one day, one day you really will be gone. You could tell him how terrifying it is to live in your bright skin. You could make him touch the place it still burns. You could touch him. You could open his veins. You could drink his blood. You could tell him the one thing that matters now:
Listen, it won’t be that long—unknown and unforgiven as I am, I want to live in my body somehow.
You could ask him who he saved tonight. You could make him tell you what he sees when he closes his eyes and the heart beneath his hands starts to beat again.

          New Stories
(2002–2010)

for wandering children and their delinquent mother

I.  FATHERS

DIDI KINKAID AND HER THREE CHILDREN
by three fathers lived in a narrow pink-and-green trailer at the end of a rutted road in Paradise Hollow. One wintry November night, fifteen days after my father died, eleven days after he was buried, Didi’s only son climbed the hill to our house, leaped from our bare maple to a windowsill on the second floor, shattered the glass above my mother’s bed, and burst, bleeding, onto her pillows.

The house was dark, all his—Mother and I had gone to town that night to eat dinner by the hot-bellied stove in my brother’s kitchen.

Evan Kinkaid helped himself to twenty-two pounds of frozen venison, a bottle of scotch, six jars of sweet peaches. The boy carried away my down comforter, a green sleeping bag, our little black-and-white television. He found Mother’s cashmere scarf, rolled tight and tucked safe in a shoebox full of cedar chips, never worn because it was too precious. Now it was gone, wrapping Evan’s throat, a lovely gift, something soft and dear for him to wear home and offer Didi. The starved boy crushed chocolate cookies in a bowl of milk and sugar. He stopped to eat, then slipped his hands in Daddy’s gloves: deerskin dyed black, lined with the silky fur of a white rabbit.

In exchange, he left his blood, his dirt, his smell of bonfire smoke everywhere.

On the playground the next day, I saw the little wolf in sheep’s clothing: Evan Kinkaid dressed in red wool and green flannel, my father’s vest and shirt—both ridiculously loose, two sizes too big for a skinny child from the Hollow.

Why should the hungry repent? Evan Kinkaid wanted me to betray him. I stared, defiant as he was.
Mine
, I thought,
one holy secret.
Mother didn’t deserve to know the truth, she who had sent me to school that day, against my will, against what I believed to be my father’s deepest wishes. He would have wanted me home, with her, waiting till dawn to fold the clothes Evan tossed and trampled in their bedroom. Daddy would have wanted me to crawl under their bed, to find every stray sock, to lay my little hands on each one of his tattered undershirts as if cloth, like skin, might still be healed. Neither he nor I wanted to lie in the dark, listening to Mother scour and scurry.

By the mercy of morning light, Daddy hoped I would discover his last words, a note to himself still crumpled in the pocket of his wrinkled trousers:
Don’t forget! Honey Walnut.
A loaf of sweet bread for me or a color of stain for a birdhouse?

The dead speak in riddles and leave us to imagine.

Face-to-face with the righteous thief, I made a vow to keep my silence. I was ten years old that winter day, arrogant enough to feel pity for this failure of a boy, Evan Kinkaid, stooped and pale, a fourteen-year-old sixth grader who had flunked three times, Evan Kinkaid, who would never go to high school.

Less than a year later, Didi Kinkaid’s pink trailer burned so hot even the refrigerator melted. By then, Didi lived in the Women’s Correctional Facility in Billings, and Evan at the Pine Hills School for Boys in Miles City. Meribeth, seventeen, the oldest Kinkaid, a good girl, a girl who might grow up to be useful, lived in Glasgow with foster parents and eight false siblings. Fierce little Holly, just eleven—the dangerous child who once stole my lunch and slammed me to the wall of the girls’ bathroom when I accused her—had become the only daughter of a hopeful Pentecostal minister and his barren wife in Polebridge.

So nobody was home the night the Kinkaids’ trailer sparked, nobody real, though on any given night there might have been six or ten or twenty-nine tossed-out, worthless, wild kids crashing at Didi’s, wishing she would return, their darling delinquent mother, dreaming she would appear in time to cook them breakfast, hoping to hear the roar and grind of her battered baby-blue Apache.

What a truck! Dusty, rusty, too dented to repair—you could squeeze thirty stray kids in the back and whoop all the way to Kalispell—you could pad the bed with leaves or rags or borrowed blankets, sleep out under the stars, warm and safe even in December.

Oh, Didi
—slim in the hips, tiny at the waist—she might have been one of them, the best one, if you didn’t spin her around too fast, if you didn’t look too closely. The lost children built shelters of sticks and tarps in the woods behind her trailer. She let them drink beer in her yard. She gave them marshmallows and hot dogs to roast over the bonfire where she burned her garbage.

No wonder they loved her.

Any day now, Didi might honk her horn and rev the engine hard to wake them.
Sweet Mother of God!
Didi, home at last with four loaves of soft white bread and a five-pound tub of creamy peanut butter.

In half-sleep, the throwaway children kept their faith, but when they woke, they remembered: Mother in chains, Didi in prison. Of her seventeen known accomplices, three were willing to testify against her.
Three of them!
Sheree, Vince, Travis.
Traitors, snitches.
Three who still believed in real homes: mothers, fathers, feather pillows, fleece blankets.

Every night, these three lay alone between clean sheets, trying to be good, trying to be quiet, taking shallow breaths, hoping their clean and perfect mothers might slip into their rooms, kneel by their beds, and with tender mouths kiss them, kiss them, kiss them.

But only Didi came, in dreams, to mock and then forgive them.

Didi Kinkaid was made for trouble, slender but round, lovely to touch, lovely to hold, and mostly she liked it. To Didi Kinkaid, any roadside motel seemed luxurious.

What she liked best was the bath after, when the man, whoever he might be that night, was drowned in sleep on the bed and she was alone, almost floating, warm in the warm water, one with the water—not like the trailer where there was only a cramped closet with a spitting shower, three kids and twelve minutes of scalding water to share among them.

Any night of the week Didi might be lucky or unlucky enough to glimpse the father of one of her children—one good ole boy pumping quarters in the jukebox to conjure Elvis, one sweet, sorry sight for sore eyes slumped on a bar stool—and a feeling long lost might rise up: pity, fear, hope, desire.

There was Billy Hayes, Meribeth’s father, and she’d loved him best, and she might have married him. But Billy was too young for Didi even when she was young—just sixteen when she was twenty—a skinny golden boy with a fuzz of beard and long flowing hair. Billy got sad when he drank and started looking like Jesus. She didn’t have a chance with Billy Hayes, a boy still in high school, a child living with his parents. Didi knew from the start a woman from the Hollow could never keep him.

Now, the taxidermist Billy Hayes was old enough, and the years between them made no difference; his hair was thin and short; he had four kids and a wife named Mary. Mary Patrillo’s patient parents had taught Billy Hayes to stuff the bodies of the dead and make the mouths of bobcats and badgers look ferocious, but the place he’d opened in Didi Kinkaid stayed empty forever.

When she told him she was pregnant, he never seemed to imagine any choice for them but having the baby—
I’ll help you
, he said. And so it was: Meribeth came to be; and though Didi thought she’d loved Billy as much as she could love anybody, the child was her first true love, her first true blessing.

Billy helped her steal a crib and a high chair, booties and bibs, disposable diapers.
Shopping
, he called it. One night, their last night, he came to the trailer with a blue rubber duck and seven white rubber ducklings, toys to float in the tub Didi didn’t have, so they put Meribeth in the kitchen sink with her eight ducks, and Billy, Sweet Billy Boy, hummed lullabies while he washed her.

Evan’s dad was a different story, a mean sonuvabitch if ever there was one—Rick McQueen, Mister Critter Control, who was kind enough in the beginning, who rescued her at two-thirty one morning when she came home to discover pack rats had invaded the trailer. It didn’t occur to her that a man willing to drown rats and feed cyanide to coyotes might harbor similar attitudes toward his own child. Evan swore to this day that he remembered his first beating.
Before I was born, when I was inside you.

He banged his head and bruised his eye. Even now, when he’s tired or mad or hungry, that place around the socket still hurts him. He traces the bone.
You have hard hips
, he says, and this much is true, so what about the rest of it?

Didi remembers how Evan kicked and punched, twisting inside her womb for days after the pummeling. She thought he’d choke, furious and desperate enough to strangle himself with his own umbilical cord. Maybe Evan truly remembers the beating, and maybe he’s only heard Didi’s story. Truth or tale—what does it matter in the end if a boy believes he felt his father’s fists hammering?

You saved me
, Didi says, and this is fact. The baby fought the man. If she’d had any inclination to forget, if she’d been tempted by Rick McQueen’s tears, scared by his threats, or lulled by his promises, the baby unknown and unnamed reminded her night and day:
You let him stay, I’ll kill him.

Holly’s father could have been any one of three people—it was a long winter, too cold, so it was hard to keep track of who was when, what might be possible. There was Didi’s cousin, Harlan Dekker, and a fat man by the river whose name she’s blissfully forgotten, and a third man too thin, like a freak, like the Emaciated Marvel in a cage at the carnival.
Half my life behind bars
, he said,
a guard, not a prisoner.
Now he lived on the road,
free
, he said, in his rust-riddled Mustang.